Web Book of Regional Science

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Measuring Amenities and Disamenities in the Housing Market: Applications of the Hedonic Method

Joshua Hall, Kerianne Lawson, and Jacob Shia

The hedonic method is an econometric technique used to measure the value of or demand for a good. By considering the characteristics of the good, the method allows for analysis of how each part contributes to the good's value. Houses have many attributes that are not directly sold but which affect their value. This can include parts of a house -- such as a pool or half bathroom -- but also publicly-provided goods whose usage is associated with the home, such as public schools. This explains the widespread use of the hedonic method in regional science as amenities and disamenities have a spatial dimension. There are thousands of research articles that employ the hedonic model and there are various modifications and contexts studied. This book contains ten articles that utilize the hedonic model to measure amenities and disamenities. Topics covered include crime, noise, hospitals, zebra mussels, and schools. The articles and introductory chapter serve both as a survey of the previous hedonic literature as well as a representative selection of different methodological issues in hedonic estimation.
The 1975 West Virginia Input-Output Study: Modeling A Regional Economy

Anthony Loviscek, Randy Holliday, Lucinda Robinson, and Melissa Wolford

This is the second set of input-output tables for West Virginia. Both are survey-based. Data for the first tables were obtained from personal interviews with representatives of a sample of West Virginia establishments. The first tables were part of a larger, and relatively well-financed, study. The present study was conducted under tight budget constraints, and the data were obtained by a mail survey. It will come as no surprise that the mail survey was less productive than the 1965 interviews
The Geography of the New Economy

R. D. Norton

As discussions of the New Economy become increasingly common, it is also clear that there the term requires some clarification. There’s a macroeconomic version, able to keep on growing rapidly without inflation, and there’s a microeconomic version, apparently driven by a new kind of firm. There’s the digital version, likely to be identified with an Information Age. Then there are variants that focus on management, labor relations, sustainable development, and other topics as well. What most new-economy approaches have in common is the idea that computers and in particular networked PCs have changed things in a fundamental way. That is the common denominator we will encounter as we look at the macro, micro, and digital versions of the new economy hypothesis in turn.
Poverty, Inequality and Social Justice in Nonmetropolitan America

Don E. Albrecht

This Web Book addresses the topics of poverty, inequality, and social justice in nonmetropolitan counties in the United States. The job structure of nonmetro communities is significantly different from the job structure in metro communities. Further, nonmetro communities face unique obstacles in implementing programs to reduce poverty. The book provides an overview of trends in and the correlates of poverty. Some of the major theoretical efforts to understand poverty are examined along with societal trends likely to impact levels of poverty and inequality in the future. The book concludes suggestions for nonmetropolitan community leaders and practitioners for dealing with poverty.
Industrial and Regional Clusters: Concepts and Comparative Applications, 2nd ed.

Edward M. Bergman and Edward J. Feser

Industry clusters refer to the tight connections that bind certain firms and industries together in various aspects of common behavior, e.g., geographic location, sources of innovation, shared suppliers and factors of production, and so forth. Industry cluster concepts date from the last century, but they have captured the imagination of active policymakers and the serious attention of scholars only in the last decade of this century. Because clustering behavior is such a pervasive aspect of modern economies and global trade, it draws the attention of many different disciplines and benefits from their scholarship. Although a consideration of research on this topic might alone justify book-length treatment, industry cluster concepts are also powerful metaphors that are used routinely to guide industrial and regional development planning throughout the world.
Point Pattern Analysis

Barry N. Boots and Arthur Getls

Points on a map can represent many important phenomena, including towns, stores and centers for shopping, industrial locations, parks, archaeological sites, plant and animal species, the home site of a person with a possible environmentally related disease, and so on. The authors introduce readers to the general analysis of the location of points on maps. Map patterns are assumed to result from one or more spatial processes in the human or physical world. Often the causal forces are known, but more frequently, researchers seek to identify them. The analysis of the spatial pattern of the phenomena under study can be a precursor for revealing the underlying causal relationships. The emphasis is upon applications, so a clear informative example explained in a step-by-step manner accompanies each point pattern analysis method. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
Analysis of Land Use Change: Theoretical and Modeling Approaches

Helen Briassoulis

This Web Book provides information on basic concepts and trends in land use change, and then reviews the state of the art in land use theory and empirical modeling. It concludes by summarizing the main issues pertaining to theories and models of land use change, discusses selected issues in of a more general concern in the context of the analysis of land use change and outlines future research directions.
Human Migration

W. A. V. Clark

Human migration affects all regions of our planet: too many persons, or too few, move into, or out of, a place. Studies of migration and mobility are a critical component of understanding population growth and change and subsequent societal problems. This book focuses on substantive empirical results generated in the three decades leading up to publication and organizes them so that the student of population will have a clearer understanding of the nature of migration, its place within demography and population geography, and the implications of population changes through migration. Although the emphasis lies on substantive empirical information, those important conceptual structures that are part of our present understanding of mobility are introduced in verbal form. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
Regional Governance, Institutions and Development

Michael Danson and Geoff Whittam

Across the world, the regional level is becoming increasingly important in economic development with a proliferation of regionally based initiatives. This has important consequences for how institutional capacity is able to take and influence decisions with regard to the long-term future development of particular localities: in short the patterns of regional governance. This book focuses on two relevant aspects: (i) the question of governance - how does the ongoing process of institution-building affect the ways in which the regions and localities are governed, including questions of democracy, participation, regional self-determination, public-private partnerships and accountability; and (ii) what are the consequences of new modes of governance and institutional change for regional development strategies and policies, particularly in the context of large-scale industrial restructuring and city-region and urban regeneration.
An Introduction to State and Local Public Finance

Thomas A. Garrett and John C. Leatherman

Public finance is the field of economics that studies government activities and the various means of financing these activities. In general, public finance deals with any of the three levels of government: federal, state, and local. While the basic theories of public finance apply regardless of the level of government studied, state and local public finance has emerged as an important sub-field of public finance in recent years.
Key Concepts in Sustainable Development

William Grunkemeyer and Myra Moss

The question we are concerned with in this document is whether sustainable development can be a community wide priority and behavior that expands, and perhaps even at times replaces, existing priorities and behaviors. The materials contained in this document are intended to help both those entering the sustainability discussion and those with a rich history of implementing sustainable activities to consider ways traditional development leadership can be integrated into current sustainable development efforts. Included in our effort to encourage this integration is a history of the sustainable development concept, a review and discussion regarding the actual definition of sustainability, a search and explanation regarding various organizations involved in the sustainability question, a comparison of sustainable development to traditional development philosophy.
Community Preparedness for Site Development

William Grunkemeyer, Myra Moss, and Jerold Thomas

Site development is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Proper planning is critical. This book's goal is to help communities prepare sites for business development. We will focus primarily on industrial and wholesale commercial sites. Our goal is not to go through a step-by-step physical development process that focuses on how to physically construct an industrial site. A separate Web Book by Steven McBride provides some of this information. Instead, we focus here on the tremendous effort required to lead up to physical site development, that is, the steps leading up to ground-breaking. It is during this time period that many communities make expensive mistakes.
Gravity and Spatial Interaction Models

Kingsley E. Haynes and A. Stewart Fotheringham

One of the major intellectual achievements and, at the same time, perhaps the most useful contribution by spatial analysts to social science literature is the development of gravity and spatial interaction models. This book provides an excellent and lucid introduction to the evolution of the gravity and spatial interaction models and their specification. These models are placed within the historical context of the development of the general spatial interaction literature. Haynes and Fotheringham outline the characteristics that have contributed to making these models among the most widely applied in forecasting and in general studies of migration, communications, transportation, and retailing, among other topics in urban and regional analysis. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
Regional Input-Output Analysis

Geoffrey J. D. Hewings

Input-output analysis is a method by which the flow of production can be traced among the various sectors of the economy, through to final demand or export. The most fundamental problem of input-output analysis is to calculate the necessary output levels of each industry required to achieve a final output. What is the effect upon the local economy from the introduction of a new firm? What are the economic linkages between regions and how is equilibrium between regions achieved? What if the supply of an input in one region becomes restricted through some bottleneck? Input-output analysis can be used to address these issues. This book will prove to be a valuable resource to students and practitioners of the planning sciences, including urban and regional economics, regional science, engineering, public administration, business management science, city and regional planning, as well as scientists in economic geography. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
An Introduction to Regional Economics

Edgar M. Hoover and Frank Giarratani

Hoover, Edgar M., Frank Giarratani. An Introduction to Regional Economics. Web Book of Regional Science. Regional Research Institute, West Virginia University. Edited by Scott Loveridge, 1999: Randall Jackson, 2020.
Input-Output Analysis: A Primer, 2nd ed.

Randall W. Jackson

Input-output (IO) analysis is a modeling framework that records the business transactions in an economy over a given time period. It is used in any number of ways, all of which are intended to improve our understanding of how industries in an economy are interrelated. The economy under study can be a national economy, a multi-state, state, or multi-county regional economy. As its name suggests, the IO accounting framework describes and depicts the input and output relationships of all industries in an economy. The utility of the IO framework is manifold. Most immediately, the inter-industry transactions table, or input-output matrix, describes the direct sales and purchases relationships among industries. The framework, in its several forms, is useful for assessing the impacts of changes in economic activity within or outside a region and for targeting industries for retention or recruitment policies. This brief monograph introduces the IO framework and addresses these and related concepts and applications.
Regional Development: Challenges, Methods, and Models

Randall W. Jackson, Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Serge Rey, and Nancy Lozano-Gracia

This Web Book reviews the challenges that the consideration of regions brings into economic analysis and provide an overview of some of the key methods and tools that can be used to gain a better understanding of how regional economies work, and through that, identify both the challenges and opportunities that they face. The exploration of these challenges begins with some consideration of the ways in which regional economies work to set the stage for subsequent sections that summarize a toolbox of methods and strategies that might be considered for evaluation of regional development initiatives. In contrast to past reviews of this field, this report presents an integration of more traditional regional macroeconomic modeling with new developments in spatial data analysis.
Regions in Changing Economic Environment

Gennadi Kazakevitch and Sharn Enzinger

The purpose of this Web Book is to consider economic change from a regional perspective. We focus on two groups of changes: microeconomic restructuring and fiscal reforms. A two region – two product model is used to illustrate the theoretical concepts discussed. The objective is to determine the impact of a particular reform upon regional expenditure patterns and, therefore upon the socio-economic situation in the region.
Keystone Sector Identification: A Graph Theory-Social Network Analysis Approach

Maureen Kilkenny and Laura Nalbarte

This Web Book presents a new a method for identifying keystone sectors in communities, where sectors are broadly defined to include churches, clubs, associations, and public institutions as well as firms and businesses. In an arch, the keystone is the one with the unique wedge shape at the top of the arch that is critical for the arch’s structural stability. While all other stones in an arch substitute for one another and can be removed (in pairs), the arch will fall apart if the keystone is lacking. The term keystone species was first coined by ecologists in the late 1960s with respect to the species uniquely responsible for the structure and integrity of an ecosystem. We now coin the term for use in community development analysis. In a community, the keystone sector is one that plays a unique role, without which the community is fundamentally and detrimentally altered.
Central Place Theory

Leslie J. King

Abstract. Central Place Theory seeks to provide an explanation of the numbers, sizes, and locations of urban settlements in essentially rural, farming regions. Why is it, for example, that there are few large cities, many more towns, and an even larger number of small villages or hamlets in such regions? Why is it that the smaller places are located closer together and the larger ones further apart? What are the relations between the roles of the diﬀerent-sized urban settlements? How do these patterns and arrangements change over time and from one region to another? These are the sorts of questions addressed by central place theory. Kink, Leslie J. Central Place Theory. Web Book of Regional Science. Regional Research Institute, West Virginia University. Edited by Grant Ian Thrall, 1985; Randall Jackson, 2020. Scientific Geography Series
The Elements of Input-Output Analysis

William H. Miernyk

The first writers to treat economics systematically — Adam Smith and his immediate successors — dealt with the economy as a whole. In today’s terminology they were concerned with macroeconomics. Later economists, notably Alfred Marshall and his followers in the Neo-classical school, focused upon the household and the firm. They inaugurated the era of microeconomics which led to Chamberlin’s theory of monopolistic competition and Mrs. Robinson’s theory of imperfect competition. The Neo-classical economists and their successors analyzed the forces which result in economic equilibrium, but their approach was that of partial equilibrium, or the method of examining "one thing at a time." During the 1930s, under the influence of John Maynard Keynes, there was a revival of interest in aggregative economics. Keynesians drew on the work of both Classical and Neo-classical schools. Like the latter, they were concerned with the forces which result in equilibrium or disequilibrium, but they returned to the Classical tradition in their emphasis on the economy as a whole. The Neo-classical economists had devoted much of their attention to the theory of value - examination of the forces which determine prices under given market conditions. The Keynesians, however, were primarily concerned with the determinants of income and employment. Their system was based on broad aggregates: total employment, total consumption, total investment, and national income. Keynesian economists showed how these variables are related to one another, and how changes in one affect the rest. They were much less interested than the Neoclassical economists in examining the effects of a change in one variable on the assumption that all others remained fixed. In this sense the Keynesians were concerned with general rather than partial equilibrium. But neither the Neo-classical economists nor the Keynesians were directly concerned with economic interdependence, with the structure of the economy and the way in which its individual sectors fit together.
Spatial Diffusion

Richard Morrill, Gary L. Gaile, and Grant Ian Thrall

This volume is about how we come to have the culture and ideas we have. Most social and economic change is a direct consequence of the diffusion of some idea or phenomenon. Ideas become diffused through society in a regular manner, and because of this regularity their diffusion can often be analyzed and even predicted. The same analytical framework applied to describe and predict the spread of some cultural or human phenomenon, such as political turmoil, can also be applied to an analysis of the spread of disease. The authors chronicle the evolution of ideas for analyzing, simulating, and forecasting the diffusion of phenomena. The goal is to contribute a synthesis of the roles of time and space, how they interdependently govern the diffusion of phenomena, and how such an understanding could be used to enhance the scientific predictability of diffusion in a wide array of contexts. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
Spatial Autocorrelation

John Odland

The analysis of spatial distributions and the processes that produce and alter them is a central theme in geographic research and this volume is concerned with statistical methods for analyzing spatial distributions by measuring and testing for spatial autocorrelation. Spatial autocorrelation exists whenever a variable exhibits a regular pattern over space in which its values at a set of locations depend on values of the same variable at other locations. Spatial autocorrelation is present, for example, when similar values cluster together on a map. Spatial autocorrelation statistics make it possible to use formal statistical procedures to measure the dependence among nearby values in a spatial distribution, test hypotheses about geographically distributed variables, and develop statistical models of spatial patterns. Scientific Geography Series Editor: Grant Ian Thrall.
Regional Population Projection Models

Andrei Rogers

Public and private institutions, organizations, and firms require information on potential demographic futures. Public organizations must anticipate future population needs and thereby judge the need for efforts to alter current population processes and trends. Private firms maximize possible profits by adjusting product lines and shifting distribution networks using information obtained from regional demographic projections. This book demonstrates how researchers can analyze the evolution of multiple regional populations, each interconnected by migration flows. The author adopts a geographical perspective by considering how fertility, mortality, and migration combine to determine the growth, age composition, and spatial distribution of a national multiregional population. This monograph should be of use to those responsible for carrying out regional population projections in public and private organizations such as national, state, and local governments, business firms, foundations, universities, labor unions, social service organizations, and various public interest groups. SCIENTIFIC GEOGRAPHY SERIES, Grant Ian Thrall, editor.
Optimal Location of Facilities

Gerard Ruston

This text is written for undergraduate students. It is derived from class notes developed for a senior-level course in the Department of Geography at The University of Iowa called The Location of Services. It uses several of the computer programs listed and documented in the companion monograph, "Computer Programs for Location-Allocation Problems." The purpose of the course, and much of this book, is to show that the location pattern of any activity influences the quality and quantity of services received and that methodologies exist to evaluate the locational effectiveness of any location pattern, to determine improvements that can be made and to compute location patterns that are optimum with respect to defined criteria.